Announcements

IDRE Call for Proposals

8-SEP-2008
The Institute for Digital Research and Education is soliciting internal proposals for focused research projects in the area of high-performance computing. The purpose of this annual solicitation is to help faculty and research groups identify and solve their “challenges” in high-performance computing.

The proposals will be selected, and awarded IDRE staff time and resources, based on the likelihood for success, the potential visibility that the project will bring to the campus and IDRE, the potential that the project will lead to future funding, lead to access to national cyber-infrastructure resources (e.g., Department of Energy INCITE awards or early access to the NSF Blue Waters machine), the ability for the project to build bridges across campus, and the alignment between the proposed topic and existing IDRE activities and expertise. Groups who have already developed relationships with IDRE staff are also encouraged to apply.

IDRE’s activities and expertise are in the following areas:

• Scaling parallel algorithms
• Porting an algorithm to multi-core processors, GPUs, or cell processors
• Analysis and visualization of large data sets
• Performance evaluation and optimization of simulation code

The proposal should be no more than two pages. It should include:

• Name, title, and department for the PI
• Title for the project
• Description of the science
• Description of the algorithm
• Description of the current challenge
• Clear description of the milestones and deliverables

If the space is needed the references can be listed on a separate page.

It is anticipated that two projects will be chosen this year.

The deadline for submission is October 22, 2008.

Please submit your proposal to atshpc@ucla.edu.

Forthcoming FY09 solicitation for CDI

4-SEP-2008
The timelines and review process for the Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) solicitation, http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07603/nsf07603.htm are changing in 2009. A revised solicitation containing these changes will be posted shortly. These planned revisions reflect NSF’s experience with the first round of proposals received in response to the previous CDI solicitation. For information about CDI, see http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/cdi/

Highlights of the revisions to the forthcoming CDI solicitation include the following:

• No Letters of Intent: The Letter of Intent stage has been eliminated. The review process is a two-stage process, as before, with a preliminary proposal submission and a subsequent full proposal submission by invitation only.
• Deadlines: The anticipated revised deadline for submission of preliminary proposals is in the late Fall of 2008. The precise deadline for submission of preliminary proposals will be scheduled on or later than 90 days after the date of solicitation posting, and will be announced in the solicitation document. The deadline for submission of full proposals will be announced in the solicitation document.
• Keywords Required: Preliminary proposal submission instructions will be modified to include refined keyword choices.
• No Type IIIs: In Fiscal Year 2009, only Type I and Type II CDI proposals will be considered.

Digital Roman Forum selected for NEH Edistement List

30-JUL-2008
The Digital Roman Forum developed through a partnership with the Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory, the Experiential Technologies Center, the Institute for Social Science Research , and IDRE:ATS has just been selected for inclusion on the NEH's Edsitement list of the best online resources for education in the humanities.

Virtual Worlds

18-JUL-08
The work of Chris Culbertson, an Interdepartmental Program Neuroscience graduate student, using a virtual world to try to find the most effective treatments for people addicted to methamphetamines, has been published in Nature. Itay Zaharovits of the ETC has been a main contributor in creating the virtual environment.

Call for Papers: 3rd Annual Chicago Digital Humanities/Computer Science Colloquium

November 1st - 3rd, 2008
The goal of the annual Chicago Digital Humanities/Computer Science (DHCS) Colloquium is to bring together researchers and scholars in the Humanities and Computer Sciences to examine the current state of Digital Humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research.

In 2006, the first DHCS Colloquium examined the challenges and opportunities posed by the "million books" digitization projects. The second DHCS Colloquium in 2007 focused on searching and querying as both tools and methodologies. The theme of the third Chicago DHCS Colloquium is "Making Sense" — an exploration of how meaning is created and apprehended at the transition of the digital and the analog. We encourage submissions from scholars and researchers on all topics that intersect current theory and practice in the Humanities and Computer Science. Sponsored by the Humanities Division, the Computational Institute, NSIT Academic Technologies and the University Library at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

10-JUN-08
An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Read more about the $133 million supercomputer machine called Roadrunner.

IDRE Cluster Hosting Program

02-JUN-08
The original Hoffman Cluster went offline on May 31, 2008. Its replacement, the new Shared Hoffman2 Cluster, logically organizes high performance clusters into several component clusters that are optimized for different research needs. Read more on how your research can benefit from this new strategy.

2009 INCITE Call for Proposals

DOE has released the 2009 INCITE Call for Proposals. The INCITE program will award significant allocations on some of the world's most powerful supercomputers to innovative, large-scale computational science projects to enable high-impact advances. See http://hpc.science.doe.gov/

IDRE makes resource awards for proposals submitted in the September 2007 IDRE call for proposals

11-MAY-08

"Exact Many-Electron Simulation Method for Bond-Breaking Reactions in Liquids". Professor Benjamin J. Schwartz and William J. Glover, Dept. of Chemistry & Biochemistry. IDRE-ATS Research Scientist Prakashan Korambath is working with this group to solve eigenvalue problem for a Sparse Matrix using Implicitly Restarted Lancoz Method to exact many-electron simulation method for bond-breaking reactions in liquids.

"High-Performance Image Processing for Cryo-Electron Microscopy", Professor Z. Hong Zhou and Xhark Zhang , Electron Imaging Center for Nanomachines, CNSI and MIMG. IDRE-ATS Research Scientists, Scott Friedman and Shao-Ching Huang are working with this group to speed up the code by performing FFT on the GPU for fast image processing and reconstruction utilizing the GPU.

Introducing the Research Computing Forum

ATS Research Computing Technologies and IDRE would like to introduce you to a new support tool for your research. The Research Computing Forum is available for you to join us and others in the UCLA High Performance Computing community to ask questions, get answers and share your knowledge and successes in your HPC endeavors.

In addition to becoming a virtual gathering spot for the UCLA HPC community, the forum is a place to collect experience and solutions to common problems faced by our community as a whole as well as even more domain specific issues. The ATS staff you have been interacting with through atshpc@ucla.edu encourages you to check the forum for up to date system announcements and answers to commonly asked questions and issues with ATS managed systems. Of course, if you need to contact us for an issue you feel is not appropriate for the forum, please do use atshpc@ucla.edu and we will do our best to help you.

Research Conducted using the UCLA Physics Saxon Cluster

A team of UCLA particle physics researchers (led by Charles Plager), which has been searching for the Flavor Changing Neutral Current (FCNC) decay of the top quark, announced a breakthrough on Feb. 14, 2008. UCLA researchers are participating in large physics experiments both at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (atom-smasher) near Geneva Switzerland and the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The UCLA team required a sizable amount of computing power, which was supplied to them by the Saxon Cluster. The Saxon cluster is owned by Professor David Saltzberg of the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy. It was installed by - and is maintained by - Academic Technology Services staff as part of the Institute for Digital Research and Education's Cluster Hosting Program. Read all about the UCLA discovery and the physics.

You can read more about the Large Hadron Collider in the February 2008 Scientific American magazine, "The Future of Physics - The Discovery Machine," by Graham P. Collins.

IDRE Postdoctoral Positions available in Computational Science, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science.

• See the Flyer for more details